final project: take one

This is the first iteration. And to be honest I would be happy if it was also the last. But I know that is not to be. My fonts don't all match. Hopefully the three different size of face can be easily identified. I am trying to figure out another way to illustrate things intead of the smile. And I think the mixed eye symbols work. I had to make this a simple chloropleth also because there are 3 states that have the death penalty on the books but haven't executed anybody. I also need to line up the methods symbols on the legend. Does the rest of the legend work or is it confusing? Are the colors a problem at all?

Happy turkey day you poor bastards of North Cakilaky

This is about as good as it gets by my hand. I have finally been a little creative when it comes to legend design and background. I think it turned out pretty well. Dr. Leslie thinks it looks a lot better than the roller skating cows. But he is still talking about that map even though he may not like it. Martha helped me a bunch with the legend layout. Now that I am done maybe she can get her work done.

the new--or rather vastly improved--color map

It was hard to do the colors by hand. I did not want to just take a color scheme straight from colorbrewer.org though it would have been easier. And it may have looked a bit better but this is a learning experience and I have learned that with a bit of work, good colors can be done by hand. It just takes longer. Much longer. Compared to the gray-scale version, this is perhaps easier to read. But I spent a few years doing black and white photography as a hobby and I think I can pick out subtleties in gray better than others. The way I displayed the data has huge swaths of the country falling into the same class and therefore are the same color. The eye did not focus on the middle gray tones in the same way as the middle green that I used. I actually prefer the gray-scale version and think that had I just tweaked a couple of the tones, it would have been more presentable.

and while i am at it--WV

3rd post of the day but separate from the other 2

here are the goofy rollerskating cows that people have been talking about.

part 2 of below post

quintiles map:

gotta play a little catch-up

my 2 different classification schemes--maximum breaks and quartiles. the latter looks better but definitely doesn't tell all the information. this is just the former--latter in above post.